The similarities go way deeper than that. Mainly, there is a strong isomorphism between how human and computer languages are encoded and interpreted/compiled.
At the lowest level, a digital "alphabet" must be imposed on this unruly analogue world. Human languages use phonemes (generally a few dozen distinct sounds) while computer languages use a character set (such as ASCII or Unicode). These alphabets are all basically a set of finite, unchanging, and meaningless symbols.
One level up are morphemes or words and word-parts that are constructed of phonemes. So "dog" is the name/morpheme we assign to the furry thing lifting its leg over your bedroom carpet; "urinate" is the morpheme we assign to its activity; and "ed" is the morpheme that signifies the activity has already completed (as in urinated). In computer languages this is called lexcal analysis, and it happens very early during compilation, usually with the help of regexps. In both cases, this phase transforms the fixed set of phonemes into a large, ever-growing set of meaningful symbols.
The next level up is syntax, in which a governing grammar (itself consisting of a closed set of abstract categories) is used to parse the morphemes/lexical tokens into tree-like data structures that will subsequently be used to determine relationships between word-units. This is where you start reading Chomsky or the Dragon book and reaching for the Midol. I don't know if it's Chomsky's fault or what, but there's a lot of similar terminology here between the same fields (e.g., syntax, grammar, parsing, production rules), as well as dissimilar terminology for roughly equivalent concepts (e.g., sentence<==>statement, clause<==>expression, paragraph<==>method).
After that comes semantics (assignment of meaning) and pragmatics (what things mean in context), for which you could find some suggestive connections with compilation (type-checking and processor-specific optimizations, perhaps), but here the easy/clean comparisons start to break down... probably because we still have a very limited understanding of how the human brain works. In both cases, it seems that there has to be a translation from the abstract, extracted idea down into the series of electrical impulses that yield a change in state of the target brain/computer.
As a completely separate topic, there is an isomorphism (in the sense of the term that Hofstadter uses in GEB) between how both human and computer languages evolve and branch cladistically with time. (And unsurprisingly, there is yet another isomorphism between biological evolution and language evolution.... we live in an endlessly fascinating world.)
Keep in mind, though, that we are ultimately finding similarities between things that are fundamentally different. Blindly inferring new "truths" about computer languages from human ones (or visa-versa) is a recipe for looking silly.
I've used X's network transparency; and I have found it useful. But sometimes an amazing way-ahead-of-its-time technology stagnates and becomes a worst-of-class-drag. You can launch a program remotely, but you cannot connect to an already running program nor can you leave it running after the connection is severed. RDP turns out to be a more user-friendly approach, and it will also pull your printers/sound/hard drives/USB devices over. Why can't open source OS's have nice things? Build Wayland, and then build a better RDP with new features like proper multi-monitor support, resolution switching, and optional seemless windowing.
Ron Paul doesn't care about civil liberties. He just thinks civil liberties should be violated at the state, not federal, level.
Well, at least at the state level, the people have more of a 'say' in the matters, and can affect change more efficiently.
Good points, both of you.
Maybe it's because I'm from the south, but it seems like the federal judiciary does a better job protecting civil rights than the state judiciaries do. It would be interesting to make a list of all the cases where a federal court has overturned a state decision on a civil-rights related case. I'd bet the a substantial percentage of them worked to increase effective freedoms rather than decrease them. Of course, that may be an artifact of the appeals process or some other phenomenon... it doesn't mean the feds are fundamentally better decision makers.
These types of investors should be fully liable when buying something so obviously bad as Farcebook on its IPO.
I'm not sure the term "liable" is appropriate here, but yes, investors should and do bear the risk for their investments.
Remember, however, that with a mutual fund, you're trusting a fund manager to enact the strategy specified in that fund's prospectus. If they don't, you might feel a little pissy that they started gambling with your money. (You could try to sue, but winning is very unlikely.)
(Here's the article I was thinking of by the way... scroll down one page and read the blue infographic box.)
You really feel bad for someone who thought it was a good idea to buy Facebook at $38/share? Do you also feel bad when gamblers, err sorry, I meant "commodity speculators", take a loss?
No, but I feel somewhat bad for the investors holding traditionally conservative mutual funds that went in heavily on Facebook. (There was a good chart on this in one of the news weekly... forgot which one.) I'm thinking this mainly impacted mom-and-pop retirees who entrusted hard-earned money to funds whose primary purpose was slow growth and/or capital preservation.
Sorry, but that is innate human behavior...we're visual beings, and one of the first things you use to judge any situation...is what you see, and you use your life experience, etc...to evaluate the situation.
Very true. We all judge books by their covers and it takes conscious, deliberate effort not to do so. If you think you're above such tendencies, then you don't know yourself very well.
The other aspect that people seem to miss is that clothing is a choice, and people consciously use clothing to signal who they are. Nobody's born in a tux, nobody spontaneously grows a T-shirt with a snarky slogan on it when they wake up. People pick their clothing choices from the cultural repertoire that's available to them. So if you want to signal respectability, you wear nicer clothes. If you want to signal conformance to a counterculture (as this hacker probably does), you wear what he's wearing. To some extent, people are justified in judging you based on what you wear because they know you had a choice in the matter.
He's a hacker, at a hacking conference, doing something that happened to be of interest to Forbes.
True... and that's probably why's he dressed the way he is. Not because he's some radical free spirit or "bad boy", but because he wants fellow hackers to think he is.
Because he isn't marketing himself to the Forbes demographic, or the general public. I'm not even sure why you think he should be.
I think if hackers inspected their own values, etc., they would realize how fundamental the "right to tinker" is to who they are. With cyberwarfare and SCADA scares in the news, it would be a good idea if hackers (by whom I mean "people who like to find security holes" not the people who like to exploit them) got some image help (because sooner or later legislation is going to take the fun out of everything). Gun owners have done this... watch them and you'll see an emphasize on safety, a studious disposition, the heaviness of gun owner responsibility, and even a dash of family/patriotism/god in the mix. (But when the camera's not rolling, they're screaming F***-YEAH!! as they squeeze of a practice round freestyle.)
would it kill you to put on the veneer of respectability?
Would it kill you to judge people based on their acts and not their appearances?
Thanks for the personnel challenge, but it's not about the impressions I'm forming. It's about the 25 million unique monthly visitors to Forbes.com and how--like it or not--appearances will affect their interpretation of this man's activities. Do you want to turn people off needlessly, or do you want to leave the best impression on as many people as possible? Don't leave "money on the table" by needlessly dressing shabby.
The hacker has (in his picture for the Forbes article) unkempt hair and a T-shirt that says "It's Fun To Use Learning For Evil!". I realize Black Hat has this whole counterculture thing going guys, but would it kill you to put on the veneer of respectability? Geez... this guy looks like a cliche movie hacker lackey.
You know that your intentions are honorable, that you wouldn't (for instance) rob a hotel room, and that maybe you are part of the process by which society gets stronger over the long run, but the audience of Forbes is predisposed to see you as a shady menace (or cost multiplier). And the audience of Forbes has more real influence to pass laws that restrict or limit access to your favorite toys (prior examples being some telephony tools, radio electronics, lockpicks, encryption software, etc.).
It sounds silly, but a clean shave and a button-down is how you say "I'm one of the good guys" to this crowd (or the general public, actually).
I'd have given a testicle for something like Khan Academy, when I was young. Instead, I got a bunch of angry overworked and under-performing teachers that just wanted me to shut up, go away.
Heck, I had good teachers, and I think having Khan+Wikipedia growing up would have been well worth a testicle!
OH, and the Davis-Besse reactor didn't cause any probvlems either.
Fortunately, the nuclear industry isn't as cavalier as you are. A close call has major consequences (in Davis-Besse's case, millions of dollars in fines and criminal indictments for 3 engineers), and the industry generally treats it as such. Every nuclear executive knows they could wake up with a Fukushima on their hands one day.
Still, the primary threat to nuclear isn't technology but culture. Attitudes such as yours (complacency) don't mix well when one is working with a reactor. Davis-Besse, incidentally, is a good example of cultural failure. NRC engineers wanted to take the thing down for an inspection out-of-cycle, Davis-Besse's operators (FirstEnergy?) lawyered up, NRC management caved ("regulatory capture") and permitted the inspection to be delayed until the next refueling outage. A classic "Challenger" ethics scenario, really.
A content-filled and freely-accessible Internet is a resource that the whole community benefits from, and yet Adblock drives up the real cost of having that content and accessibility.
Just FYI, Adblock is working with advertising companies to permit non-intrusive advertising. They don't allow very many at this point, but the feature is implemented in the current version of the software and enabled by default; they are working to build a process for handling the exceptions list.
I say all this because the popularity of Adblock was driven not by a blanket hatred of online advertising, but by the aggressiveness with which some players tried to overtap the market for eyeballs. E.g. your fellow advertisers played a role in precipitating this because they used pop-ups, overlays, flashy animations, and other gratuitous elements to outshout you.
I'm not saying the world is a fair place or that Adblockers such as myself are perfectly in the right. What I am saying is that the web-centric approach is a great equalizer: customers have more choices in how they consume content, and content producers can't impose the same 33% ad content that cable TV does*. (It's also a great equalizer for little guy content-producers, who no longer have to own a media empire to put compelling content out there.)
(*I made up the 33% number... that's just my estimate based on watching the clock a few times, and it doesn't include ticker ads, corner overlays, or product placements. Would love to see the actual data for cable TV in various markets.)
Why is everyone so obsessed with unifying interfaces? Sometimes, different interfaces are *necessary* to achieve wildly differing functionalities on the desktop and portable devices.
OS vendors want one unified OS to market and maintain. Developers want one unified platform to target code for. IT groups want a standardized ecosystem when possible. Tech-savvy users would like one set of apps that runs everywhere. And ordinary users that just want the best experience with each individual device? I don't know that anyone is talking to them...:O
For instance, there is a myth that the Civil War was fought over slavery, but this is not true - it was fought over States Rights, such as the right to enslave their own people.
Heh... I like your addition to the standard "it was about state's rights" rhetoric. However--in my brief analysis a few months back--it really was about slavery. If you want to delve the issue, look at the Confederate Constitution (which altered the federal-state dynamic but did not appreciably shift the balance of the power back to the states) and the acts of secession that various states issued. States right's got some lip service, but slavery was enshrined. It's hard not to come away with the conclusion that this war wouldn't have happened had it not been for Southern farmers protecting their profit margins [and Lincoln... I have not studied his motivations yet].
Did you think about it, or did you just not use it because it's popular, and you have committed to an emotional ID of being on the outside cause you think it's cool?
I might avoid a design because of its popularity. I'd be reluctant to wear houndstooth in Tuscaloosa, for instance, and I'd like to wear all-black occasionally except Johnny Cash, Steve Jobs, and all the emo kids got there first. I'm not above ego.
But FB falls into a different category. I have maybe ~half a dozen things I boycott, with varying levels of severity/commitment. Some of them are for philosophical reasons (privacy, liberty, decentralization of power), some of them are for lifestyle reasons (I like to write in complete sentences, you twits), and some are for economic reasons (such as "I could afford your exorbitant rates, but I'm P.O.ed that you've bribed my government into protecting you from competition").
You may argue that these boycotts are irrational, that I apply them inconsistently, and that they are pointless unless they have a significant chance of effecting some positive social change. You would be right, but I wouldn't care much. Rationality is a tool [one I must aggressively apply everyday no matter how often it bruises my ego], but it's not an end to itself. As Bruce Sterling put it in one of his short stories ("Swarm"): "Intelligence is very much a two-edged sword... It interferes with the business of living. Life, and intelligence, do not mix very well. They are not at all closely related.".
The web is not simply whatever is transmitted over HTTP. It's an information space, where anything addressable by URI is a leaf in the node.
The web is an "information space" with abstract entities that cannot (necessarily) be located or interpreted in any consistent way? Sorry, but even though you have cited mightly (invoking the great TBL himself), this is strictly an academic viewpoint. It's cute, but I wouldn't bring it up in a job interview.
For practicioners, the web is a specific technological ecosystem backed by a specific set of protocols and a handful of major players. And NNTP ain't it.
Man travels to France. Chooses to eat at McDonald's. Seriously. Then COMPLAINS he gets beaten up!
Heh... I remember taking several trips to the McD's on Champs Elysées because it was the cheapest place to get a large cold Coke. Good for my travel cred? No, but soft drinks are sort of my touchpoint with home while abroad, and they reduced the nervousness and insecurity of traveling alone in foreign lands. (And you gotta hand it to Coca-Cola... you can get their product anywhere.)
The Catholic Church is strictly organized as Lord Jesus modeled it on the roman imperial military.
Jesus didn't model it on the Roman imperial military. Neither did Peter. Paul might have, since he's the one who actually created the Catholic Church. But if so, it's not a useful structure in today's world.
More like Constantine the Great. Before then, individual "bishops" (claiming lineage from the apostles) acted like mini-popes, interpreting religious texts and and exerting control over a town, municipality, or region. It's a very muddy period of Christian history that we don't know a whole lot about, but it wasn't centrally planned and orchestrated like a military.
Okay, I'm listening. What points of consensus on morality has the atheist community reached? Just a "Top 5" moral axioms that you'd say we could ask another atheist at random on and see that there's agreement with you on validity and priority.
Unless you can specify your justification for your moral axioms in terms of them being objectively valid... it's just subjective opinion you can ignore at will, and not a system of "morality" at all.
Is art objective? Architecture? Design? Justice? Just because (1) systems of reasoning ("schools of thought") cannot prove an ultimate validity or ultimate objectiveness and (2) many such systems of reasoning develop within a field over time, doesn't mean that practitioners of a system are not disciplined to their practice of it.
Getting credit merely for using the word "morality" while feeling free to ignore any and all specific expectations of any moral system, whenever and however you wish, though, seems to generally be the actual goal in the first place.
I suggest that moral impulses are innate. That while they realize many different forms (and occasionally get mutilated by this thing we called human rationality), those impulses actually arise from evolutionary desirable game-theoretic principals. Religion merely capitalizes on this impulse by codifying them.
Dropping the requests on the floor and teaching these folks a valuable lesson would have been handling it right.
Hopefully you don't actually work in IT... If you do, I'm sure it won't last with an attitude like that. Dropping requests, and disconnecting users with no warning is almost never a good idea.
No kidding... poster has a terrible attitude, as does the summary. People don't "think they have better things to do than check their internet security", it's that people don't have the extensive background needed to somewhat safely run a PC. And guess what... expecting everyone to acquire the experience you have in order to run a PC is about as reasonable as expecting you to learn automobile mechanics to run a car or real estate law to buy a house or electrical wiring to live in anything more complicated than a tent. It's called specialization, and it's been around (ever-growing) for the past 6000 years or so.
Think of it another way: you have value as an IT person because you can hide/reduce the complexity required to do what someone else wants. If the job were simpler, your employer should be hiring someone of less ability.
Today, no non-X app is network transparent. Tomorrow, no non-X app will be network transparent.
If nothing is changing, how can something break?
Idiot.
You know what he means. Tomorrow (if Wayland becomes ascendent), the previously X-based API's you use for drawing a GUI will migrate to Wayland and your app will have to either give up network transparency or forgo the latest version (which might be fine at first, but will eventually force you to confront some form of version/dependency/compiler/forking hell). What's "breaking" is the ease of future development...
Of course, I think defenders of X are pretty slow to acknowledge the problems with how X handles network transparency. It's useful to an extent, but the way Microsoft did it with RDP is way more user-friendly.
I turned off MS Word's after too many false positives such as eliminating the passive voice
I struggle with passive voice myself, especially when writing technical documentation. I have often found it revelatory to force myself to write in the active voice; making yourself name an actor for each "truth" can force hidden preconceptions to the surface and help you think about how things really work. On the other hand, abstractions--especially those that are semi-mathematical in nature--seem to "want" to be expressed in passive form. Sometime active voice clarifies; sometimes it just clutters.
I don't have a great theory yet (despite thinking about this for many years), but I suspect that every professional can benefit from practicing active voice, even if they don't end up using it in the final draft.
Active-vs-passive is sort of like the code-vs-data issue in programming. That is, for a particular problem, should you write some procedural code that directly does the job at hand (active voice), or should you take a more declarative approach and express key aspects of the job as raw data (passive voice) that then gets interpreted by a procedural kernel?
BTW, Word lets you turn off rules individually. For instance, I don't check for contractions.
Slashdot Mirror
The similarity with spoken language is uncanny.
The similarities go way deeper than that. Mainly, there is a strong isomorphism between how human and computer languages are encoded and interpreted/compiled.
At the lowest level, a digital "alphabet" must be imposed on this unruly analogue world. Human languages use phonemes (generally a few dozen distinct sounds) while computer languages use a character set (such as ASCII or Unicode). These alphabets are all basically a set of finite, unchanging, and meaningless symbols.
One level up are morphemes or words and word-parts that are constructed of phonemes. So "dog" is the name/morpheme we assign to the furry thing lifting its leg over your bedroom carpet; "urinate" is the morpheme we assign to its activity; and "ed" is the morpheme that signifies the activity has already completed (as in urinated). In computer languages this is called lexcal analysis, and it happens very early during compilation, usually with the help of regexps. In both cases, this phase transforms the fixed set of phonemes into a large, ever-growing set of meaningful symbols.
The next level up is syntax, in which a governing grammar (itself consisting of a closed set of abstract categories) is used to parse the morphemes/lexical tokens into tree-like data structures that will subsequently be used to determine relationships between word-units. This is where you start reading Chomsky or the Dragon book and reaching for the Midol. I don't know if it's Chomsky's fault or what, but there's a lot of similar terminology here between the same fields (e.g., syntax, grammar, parsing, production rules), as well as dissimilar terminology for roughly equivalent concepts (e.g., sentence<==>statement, clause<==>expression, paragraph<==>method).
After that comes semantics (assignment of meaning) and pragmatics (what things mean in context), for which you could find some suggestive connections with compilation (type-checking and processor-specific optimizations, perhaps), but here the easy/clean comparisons start to break down... probably because we still have a very limited understanding of how the human brain works. In both cases, it seems that there has to be a translation from the abstract, extracted idea down into the series of electrical impulses that yield a change in state of the target brain/computer.
As a completely separate topic, there is an isomorphism (in the sense of the term that Hofstadter uses in GEB) between how both human and computer languages evolve and branch cladistically with time. (And unsurprisingly, there is yet another isomorphism between biological evolution and language evolution.... we live in an endlessly fascinating world.)
Keep in mind, though, that we are ultimately finding similarities between things that are fundamentally different. Blindly inferring new "truths" about computer languages from human ones (or visa-versa) is a recipe for looking silly.
I've used X's network transparency; and I have found it useful. But sometimes an amazing way-ahead-of-its-time technology stagnates and becomes a worst-of-class-drag. You can launch a program remotely, but you cannot connect to an already running program nor can you leave it running after the connection is severed. RDP turns out to be a more user-friendly approach, and it will also pull your printers/sound/hard drives/USB devices over. Why can't open source OS's have nice things? Build Wayland, and then build a better RDP with new features like proper multi-monitor support, resolution switching, and optional seemless windowing.
Well, at least at the state level, the people have more of a 'say' in the matters, and can affect change more efficiently.
Good points, both of you.
Maybe it's because I'm from the south, but it seems like the federal judiciary does a better job protecting civil rights than the state judiciaries do. It would be interesting to make a list of all the cases where a federal court has overturned a state decision on a civil-rights related case. I'd bet the a substantial percentage of them worked to increase effective freedoms rather than decrease them. Of course, that may be an artifact of the appeals process or some other phenomenon... it doesn't mean the feds are fundamentally better decision makers.
These types of investors should be fully liable when buying something so obviously bad as Farcebook on its IPO.
I'm not sure the term "liable" is appropriate here, but yes, investors should and do bear the risk for their investments.
Remember, however, that with a mutual fund, you're trusting a fund manager to enact the strategy specified in that fund's prospectus. If they don't, you might feel a little pissy that they started gambling with your money. (You could try to sue, but winning is very unlikely.)
(Here's the article I was thinking of by the way... scroll down one page and read the blue infographic box.)
You really feel bad for someone who thought it was a good idea to buy Facebook at $38/share? Do you also feel bad when gamblers, err sorry, I meant "commodity speculators", take a loss?
No, but I feel somewhat bad for the investors holding traditionally conservative mutual funds that went in heavily on Facebook. (There was a good chart on this in one of the news weekly... forgot which one.) I'm thinking this mainly impacted mom-and-pop retirees who entrusted hard-earned money to funds whose primary purpose was slow growth and/or capital preservation.
Sorry, but that is innate human behavior...we're visual beings, and one of the first things you use to judge any situation...is what you see, and you use your life experience, etc...to evaluate the situation.
Very true. We all judge books by their covers and it takes conscious, deliberate effort not to do so. If you think you're above such tendencies, then you don't know yourself very well.
The other aspect that people seem to miss is that clothing is a choice, and people consciously use clothing to signal who they are. Nobody's born in a tux, nobody spontaneously grows a T-shirt with a snarky slogan on it when they wake up. People pick their clothing choices from the cultural repertoire that's available to them. So if you want to signal respectability, you wear nicer clothes. If you want to signal conformance to a counterculture (as this hacker probably does), you wear what he's wearing. To some extent, people are justified in judging you based on what you wear because they know you had a choice in the matter.
He's a hacker, at a hacking conference, doing something that happened to be of interest to Forbes.
True... and that's probably why's he dressed the way he is. Not because he's some radical free spirit or "bad boy", but because he wants fellow hackers to think he is.
Because he isn't marketing himself to the Forbes demographic, or the general public. I'm not even sure why you think he should be.
I think if hackers inspected their own values, etc., they would realize how fundamental the "right to tinker" is to who they are. With cyberwarfare and SCADA scares in the news, it would be a good idea if hackers (by whom I mean "people who like to find security holes" not the people who like to exploit them) got some image help (because sooner or later legislation is going to take the fun out of everything). Gun owners have done this... watch them and you'll see an emphasize on safety, a studious disposition, the heaviness of gun owner responsibility, and even a dash of family/patriotism/god in the mix. (But when the camera's not rolling, they're screaming F***-YEAH!! as they squeeze of a practice round freestyle.)
would it kill you to put on the veneer of respectability?
Would it kill you to judge people based on their acts and not their appearances?
Thanks for the personnel challenge, but it's not about the impressions I'm forming. It's about the 25 million unique monthly visitors to Forbes.com and how--like it or not--appearances will affect their interpretation of this man's activities. Do you want to turn people off needlessly, or do you want to leave the best impression on as many people as possible? Don't leave "money on the table" by needlessly dressing shabby.
The hacker has (in his picture for the Forbes article) unkempt hair and a T-shirt that says "It's Fun To Use Learning For Evil!". I realize Black Hat has this whole counterculture thing going guys, but would it kill you to put on the veneer of respectability? Geez... this guy looks like a cliche movie hacker lackey.
You know that your intentions are honorable, that you wouldn't (for instance) rob a hotel room, and that maybe you are part of the process by which society gets stronger over the long run, but the audience of Forbes is predisposed to see you as a shady menace (or cost multiplier). And the audience of Forbes has more real influence to pass laws that restrict or limit access to your favorite toys (prior examples being some telephony tools, radio electronics, lockpicks, encryption software, etc.).
It sounds silly, but a clean shave and a button-down is how you say "I'm one of the good guys" to this crowd (or the general public, actually).
I'd have given a testicle for something like Khan Academy, when I was young. Instead, I got a bunch of angry overworked and under-performing teachers that just wanted me to shut up, go away.
Heck, I had good teachers, and I think having Khan+Wikipedia growing up would have been well worth a testicle!
WHEW, that was close!
OH, and the Davis-Besse reactor didn't cause any probvlems either.
Fortunately, the nuclear industry isn't as cavalier as you are. A close call has major consequences (in Davis-Besse's case, millions of dollars in fines and criminal indictments for 3 engineers), and the industry generally treats it as such. Every nuclear executive knows they could wake up with a Fukushima on their hands one day.
Still, the primary threat to nuclear isn't technology but culture. Attitudes such as yours (complacency) don't mix well when one is working with a reactor. Davis-Besse, incidentally, is a good example of cultural failure. NRC engineers wanted to take the thing down for an inspection out-of-cycle, Davis-Besse's operators (FirstEnergy?) lawyered up, NRC management caved ("regulatory capture") and permitted the inspection to be delayed until the next refueling outage. A classic "Challenger" ethics scenario, really.
A content-filled and freely-accessible Internet is a resource that the whole community benefits from, and yet Adblock drives up the real cost of having that content and accessibility.
Just FYI, Adblock is working with advertising companies to permit non-intrusive advertising. They don't allow very many at this point, but the feature is implemented in the current version of the software and enabled by default; they are working to build a process for handling the exceptions list.
I say all this because the popularity of Adblock was driven not by a blanket hatred of online advertising, but by the aggressiveness with which some players tried to overtap the market for eyeballs. E.g. your fellow advertisers played a role in precipitating this because they used pop-ups, overlays, flashy animations, and other gratuitous elements to outshout you.
I'm not saying the world is a fair place or that Adblockers such as myself are perfectly in the right. What I am saying is that the web-centric approach is a great equalizer: customers have more choices in how they consume content, and content producers can't impose the same 33% ad content that cable TV does*. (It's also a great equalizer for little guy content-producers, who no longer have to own a media empire to put compelling content out there.)
(*I made up the 33% number... that's just my estimate based on watching the clock a few times, and it doesn't include ticker ads, corner overlays, or product placements. Would love to see the actual data for cable TV in various markets.)
Why is everyone so obsessed with unifying interfaces? Sometimes, different interfaces are *necessary* to achieve wildly differing functionalities on the desktop and portable devices.
OS vendors want one unified OS to market and maintain. Developers want one unified platform to target code for. IT groups want a standardized ecosystem when possible. Tech-savvy users would like one set of apps that runs everywhere. And ordinary users that just want the best experience with each individual device? I don't know that anyone is talking to them... :O
For instance, there is a myth that the Civil War was fought over slavery, but this is not true - it was fought over States Rights, such as the right to enslave their own people.
Heh... I like your addition to the standard "it was about state's rights" rhetoric. However--in my brief analysis a few months back--it really was about slavery. If you want to delve the issue, look at the Confederate Constitution (which altered the federal-state dynamic but did not appreciably shift the balance of the power back to the states) and the acts of secession that various states issued. States right's got some lip service, but slavery was enshrined. It's hard not to come away with the conclusion that this war wouldn't have happened had it not been for Southern farmers protecting their profit margins [and Lincoln... I have not studied his motivations yet].
Did you think about it, or did you just not use it because it's popular, and you have committed to an emotional ID of being on the outside cause you think it's cool?
I might avoid a design because of its popularity. I'd be reluctant to wear houndstooth in Tuscaloosa, for instance, and I'd like to wear all-black occasionally except Johnny Cash, Steve Jobs, and all the emo kids got there first. I'm not above ego.
But FB falls into a different category. I have maybe ~half a dozen things I boycott, with varying levels of severity/commitment. Some of them are for philosophical reasons (privacy, liberty, decentralization of power), some of them are for lifestyle reasons (I like to write in complete sentences, you twits), and some are for economic reasons (such as "I could afford your exorbitant rates, but I'm P.O.ed that you've bribed my government into protecting you from competition").
You may argue that these boycotts are irrational, that I apply them inconsistently, and that they are pointless unless they have a significant chance of effecting some positive social change. You would be right, but I wouldn't care much. Rationality is a tool [one I must aggressively apply everyday no matter how often it bruises my ego], but it's not an end to itself. As Bruce Sterling put it in one of his short stories ("Swarm"): "Intelligence is very much a two-edged sword... It interferes with the business of living. Life, and intelligence, do not mix very well. They are not at all closely related.".
(Seriously... FB can't die soon enough for me; I'm getting tired of holding out.)
The web is not simply whatever is transmitted over HTTP. It's an information space, where anything addressable by URI is a leaf in the node.
The web is an "information space" with abstract entities that cannot (necessarily) be located or interpreted in any consistent way? Sorry, but even though you have cited mightly (invoking the great TBL himself), this is strictly an academic viewpoint. It's cute, but I wouldn't bring it up in a job interview.
For practicioners, the web is a specific technological ecosystem backed by a specific set of protocols and a handful of major players. And NNTP ain't it.
and "Behold!" cried the archangel, "Sony has done something cool. Tremble with fear all ye nations...."
Man travels to France. Chooses to eat at McDonald's. Seriously. Then COMPLAINS he gets beaten up!
Heh... I remember taking several trips to the McD's on Champs Elysées because it was the cheapest place to get a large cold Coke. Good for my travel cred? No, but soft drinks are sort of my touchpoint with home while abroad, and they reduced the nervousness and insecurity of traveling alone in foreign lands. (And you gotta hand it to Coca-Cola... you can get their product anywhere.)
The Catholic Church is strictly organized as Lord Jesus modeled it on the roman imperial military.
Jesus didn't model it on the Roman imperial military. Neither did Peter. Paul might have, since he's the one who actually created the Catholic Church. But if so, it's not a useful structure in today's world.
More like Constantine the Great. Before then, individual "bishops" (claiming lineage from the apostles) acted like mini-popes, interpreting religious texts and and exerting control over a town, municipality, or region. It's a very muddy period of Christian history that we don't know a whole lot about, but it wasn't centrally planned and orchestrated like a military.
Okay, I'm listening. What points of consensus on morality has the atheist community reached? Just a "Top 5" moral axioms that you'd say we could ask another atheist at random on and see that there's agreement with you on validity and priority.
Don't lie. Don't cheat. Don't steal. Don't kill. Don't rape.
All humanity--theistic and otherwise--agree on the principals. It's the exceptions that cause so much fuss.
Unless you can specify your justification for your moral axioms in terms of them being objectively valid... it's just subjective opinion you can ignore at will, and not a system of "morality" at all.
Is art objective? Architecture? Design? Justice? Just because (1) systems of reasoning ("schools of thought") cannot prove an ultimate validity or ultimate objectiveness and (2) many such systems of reasoning develop within a field over time, doesn't mean that practitioners of a system are not disciplined to their practice of it.
Getting credit merely for using the word "morality" while feeling free to ignore any and all specific expectations of any moral system, whenever and however you wish, though, seems to generally be the actual goal in the first place.
I suggest that moral impulses are innate. That while they realize many different forms (and occasionally get mutilated by this thing we called human rationality), those impulses actually arise from evolutionary desirable game-theoretic principals. Religion merely capitalizes on this impulse by codifying them.
How is this handling it right?
Dropping the requests on the floor and teaching these folks a valuable lesson would have been handling it right.
Hopefully you don't actually work in IT... If you do, I'm sure it won't last with an attitude like that. Dropping requests, and disconnecting users with no warning is almost never a good idea.
No kidding... poster has a terrible attitude, as does the summary. People don't "think they have better things to do than check their internet security", it's that people don't have the extensive background needed to somewhat safely run a PC. And guess what... expecting everyone to acquire the experience you have in order to run a PC is about as reasonable as expecting you to learn automobile mechanics to run a car or real estate law to buy a house or electrical wiring to live in anything more complicated than a tent. It's called specialization, and it's been around (ever-growing) for the past 6000 years or so.
Think of it another way: you have value as an IT person because you can hide/reduce the complexity required to do what someone else wants. If the job were simpler, your employer should be hiring someone of less ability.
Today, no non-X app is network transparent. Tomorrow, no non-X app will be network transparent.
If nothing is changing, how can something break?
Idiot.
You know what he means. Tomorrow (if Wayland becomes ascendent), the previously X-based API's you use for drawing a GUI will migrate to Wayland and your app will have to either give up network transparency or forgo the latest version (which might be fine at first, but will eventually force you to confront some form of version/dependency/compiler/forking hell). What's "breaking" is the ease of future development...
Of course, I think defenders of X are pretty slow to acknowledge the problems with how X handles network transparency. It's useful to an extent, but the way Microsoft did it with RDP is way more user-friendly.
I turned off MS Word's after too many false positives such as eliminating the passive voice
I struggle with passive voice myself, especially when writing technical documentation. I have often found it revelatory to force myself to write in the active voice; making yourself name an actor for each "truth" can force hidden preconceptions to the surface and help you think about how things really work. On the other hand, abstractions--especially those that are semi-mathematical in nature--seem to "want" to be expressed in passive form. Sometime active voice clarifies; sometimes it just clutters.
I don't have a great theory yet (despite thinking about this for many years), but I suspect that every professional can benefit from practicing active voice, even if they don't end up using it in the final draft.
Active-vs-passive is sort of like the code-vs-data issue in programming. That is, for a particular problem, should you write some procedural code that directly does the job at hand (active voice), or should you take a more declarative approach and express key aspects of the job as raw data (passive voice) that then gets interpreted by a procedural kernel?
BTW, Word lets you turn off rules individually. For instance, I don't check for contractions.